Ruff and Reddy

The Ruff & Reddy Show was a Hanna-Barbera animated series starring Ruff, a cat voiced by Don Messick, and Reddy, a dog voiced by Daws Butler. First broadcast in December 1957 on NBC, it was the first television show produced by Hanna-Barbera.

William Hanna and Joseph Barbera entered the television field fresh from serving as the heads of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer animation department, which shut down in June 1957. Unlike its successor The Huckleberry Hound Show, Ruff and Reddy featured a live action host, Jimmy Blaine, and various theatrical cartoons from Columbia Pictures' Screen Gems library including The Fox and the Crow and Li'l Abner filling up the rest of the half-hour.

Messick's "Ruff" voice characterization was very similar to the one he would later use for Pixie the mouse. Butler used his tried-and-true Southern drawl for "Reddy", a voice that would later become mainly identified with Huckleberry Hound. A supporting character in some episodes was the tiny-sized Professor Gizmo (also voiced by Don Messick). The show's episodes borrowed from the serialized storytelling format of such shows as Crusader Rabbit by making extensive use of cliffhanger storylines.

Ruff and Reddy was broadcast in black and white until fall 1959, when it went to color. NBC cancelled the show at the end of the 1959-1960 season, and was later rerun in 1962 with Captain Bob Cottle as the live-action host.

The characters next appeared on The ABC Saturday Superstar Movie, in the episode Yogi's Ark Lark (which featured almost every Hanna-Barbera animal character that existed at the time). Since then, they haven't been used in anything new.

Episodes of Ruff and Reddy later appeared on one volume of the Hanna-Barbera Personal Favorites home video series called "Animal Follies" along with Yippee, Yappee and Yahooey, Touché Turtle, Augie Doggie and Snagglepuss.